Tales of the Aggronaut

Goodbye Cataclysm

January 14, 2014 by Belghast

Feeling Human

This morning is the first day in a long while that I have felt pretty decent. I went to bed around 9:30, but had to get right back up shortly after and deal with one of our ferrets. Our “old man” had made a horrendous mess of himself and as a result we decided there was more there than could be cleaned up with wet wipes. As a result we gave him an impromptu bath and then made sure to get some nutrients down him. We really need to talk to the vet about him, because at this point I am not really sure how good of quality of life he is really having. One of his two back legs just simply doesn’t work right most of the time. He will be just fine one moment, and then the next he will be tripping all over himself. Which is something we went through with his brother bandit when he got insulinoma… for which there really is no course of treatment in a ferret that old.

Even with the last minute excitement last night, I did still manage to make it to bed before 10 and slept through the entire night. I woke up a few minutes before the alarm was set to go off this morning, so I got a wee bit of a head start on the day. Right now I am feeling rather chipper, but I am sure that will be quelled as I actually get to work and see whatever stacked up yesterday while I was gone. I am looking forward to feeling human again, so here is hoping it lasts. Since I’ve gone over 48 hours without developing a fever, I am assuming that I am not contagious. My wife went to work yesterday and came home completely drained, so I am figuring that will also be the case for me. As a result I really don’t have much plans for doing anything when I get home but crashing.

Goodbye Cataclysm

I really did not do much of any consequence last night. It came time for our Monday night flex raid and I just was not capable of concentrating. Instead I continued to piddle around on Belglorian my Discipline Priest. I have decided that the thing I enjoy about Discipline is that they are kind of the “tanks” of cloth wearers. So long as I keep my shield up on myself, I can survive damned near anything and eventually win the fight…. albeit extremely slowly. The thing I did not realize however was just how much splash healing I was throwing around. One of the early Pandaria quests involves reviving a bunch of pilots that crashed landed in amongst a bunch of orcs. As I was working on killing the orcs I kept noticing that I was getting credit for reviving pilots.

I thought that maybe the quest was bugged and I was getting credit for another player reviving them in the vicinity. As I got closer to one and started nuking away with smite I noticed that I kept healing the NPCs. I am sure this will sound insane to most people but you have to understand… my priest was my free level 80 character I made when I accepted a scroll of resurrection. I am the future of our game… a high level player with no real clues about how the class works. Initially I had planned on leveling as shadow, but when a friend told me about the sheer survive of Discipline I made the switch without much effort put into researching the spec. It was one of those things that just worked, and the gameplay seemed extremely simple.

The problem with being handed all of these tools is I have no clue what half of them do, especially the passives. Sure I see pretty little icons proc at the top of my screen but I am far too busy killing things to actually hover over them and see what just happened. Now I had the common sense to at least research spell rotation and things like that before sitting down and building my hotbars, you can guarantee that not every instant 90 will do the same. Anyways enough of that old soap box, but I am the prime example of what happens when you hand someone a nearly fully leveled character.

Imperial Silk

I will admit that I had no real plans to ever level a priest, and since I got a free level 80… I decided to make it a priest since that was the least likely for me to ever level. One of the gaps that I decided to fill with this instant 80… was a Tailor. So for while some time I was a level 80 priest sitting in Stormwind with capped out tailoring, and no real way to make the ever so spiffy imperial silk. Sure I could have had someone summon me over to the Silken Fields, but that just seemed too cheesy even for me. As a result I decided to level the priest so I could legitimately start making bags for my army of alts. Funny thing is that somewhere along the way I actually started enjoying playing the class… even though I am probably playing it wrong. I like smiting things down while laughing off the damage I am taking with my shields.

Speaking of army of alts… I have to say having one of every crafting profession comes in really damned handy. The moment I dinged 85… I went through a flurry of activity logging in and out various characters. When I finished I had a complete set of Pandaria level armor, a new staff, and a new cloak… and as soon as I get to 87 I will make a new trinket. I’ve decided to level up alchemy on this guy as well, so at some point I will feed him a bunch of herbs which should allow him to equip the alchemy trinket as well. Mostly I am doing this so that I can have an elixir master as well as my transmute master. I technically have a third alchemist, but I am not sure if it is worth having a potion master as well. The only thing I can see myself making a lot of that might be worth it is Luck Potions. Depending on how I feel tonight, I might farm up materials for a push through alchemy at all levels.

Forced Convalescence

January 13, 2014 by Belghast

Remnants of Flu

I have to say I feel horrible. Saturday morning my wife was diagnosed with the flu, and at some point after that I started getting symptoms myself. As a result I started my own dose of Tamiflu as well to try and keep things from developing into the full blown flu. I think more or less I am keeping from falling deep into the recesses of fludom. I am not running a fever, but I generally don’t run a fever ever. I do however have full body aches and lots of coughing. My wife has been trying to get me to sleep as much as I can, but that ends up causing more issues like not being able to sleep at night.

I did however take some Nyquil and it allowed me to sleep some, and I managed to stay in bed until after 9 am this morning. Which is why you are getting my traditional post considerably later than normal. At this point I am not really sure what I am going to talk about this morning since in my convalescence I really have not done anything terribly exciting. I am expecting to be back at work tomorrow, since I doubt if I am contagious since it doesn’t seem like I have developed the full blown thing… just some kind of touch of it. I guess I am just left with the whole feeling miserable thing.

Forced Convalescence

One of the cool doodads that I picked up over the break is a Google Chromecast. Previously we had been a Roku household and both the living room and the bedroom televisions had the original Roku model hooked to them. While there was nothing wrong with these models, and we had gotten more than our fair share of use from them… over time they began to feel a little clunky. When Chromecast added support for Plex I started seriously plotting the move to the nifty $35 Google Dongle. After about a week of using the one in the livingroom, I popped back out to best buy and picked up a second dongle for the bedroom TV. Luckily at that point I seemed to catch a sale on them and snagged the second for only $29.

What is cool about it is that streaming to the Chromecast seems to work equally well from my Toshiba Android tablet and my wife’s iPad 2. So she has been using it to stream exercise videos in the bedroom, and in my forced state of convalescence I have been using it to stream Lost Girl over Netflix. I have to say that show is far better than I ever expected it to be. Lost Girl was always a show I caught a few minutes of before watching Being Human. After spending some time with it over the last couple days I have to say I am enjoying it quite a bit. The characters are really engaging and I love Kenzi to pieces.

Disciple of Discipline

The other thing I have been doing during my upright periods, is working on leveling my priest. So far I have taken my shortcut through cataclysm. Essentially I start in hyjal and do the first few quest chains in deepholme until I ding 83. At that point I switch to Uldum and quest along until I hit 84… immediately switching to Twilight Highlands which usually dings 85 before I have gotten very far into it. Sure it is pure hell on quest completion, but usually my goal is to get the hell out of Cataclysm as quickly as possible. Burning Crusade used to be the content I avoided like the plague, but quite honestly I find it more enjoyable than I do the Cata content. Ultimately my goal is to get to Pandaria as fast as I can, because other than a few bum quest chains I greatly prefer that content.

Additionally I am still working on the Netherwing faction on Belgrave. Right now I am roughly halfway to revered so it feels like I am actually making progress. Yesterday I stumbled my way through all of the flight quests out there, which are admittedly ridiculously easy now since it seems near impossible for one of the NPCs to actually knock you off your mount these days. I figure at this point I have a few more weeks of daily quests and then I will be the proud owner of a new batch of netherwing mounts. Right now I would trade all the progress in for just feeling better. On that note I think I am going to cut this off and go be comatose a bit longer.

SteamWorld Dig

January 12, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #1

This is the beginning of a brand new segment for my blog. In truth for awhile now I have been trying to come up with a good way to start this feature. Originally I was going to call it “Sunday Indie Sunday” but that never really got off the ground. The idea behind Steampowered Sunday is really simple. Over the years I have built up a large backlog of titles from steam sales and the various humble bundles that I have never actually played or at the very least not really played enough to feel like I have given the game its due.

My goal is to grab a “new to me” game each Sunday and give it a decent amount of play time. Afterwards of course I will be writing a blog entry about the game. This isn’t necessarily a review, but more my thoughts and impressions about the game play I just experienced. My friends are already talking about griefing me by adding more games to my list. So we will see how far I can actually make a dent and if I can actually keep up with this feature.

Steamworld Dig

The first title to explore seemed like an obvious pick… since the feature is called Steampowered Sunday, then why not delve into a game called Steamworld Dig. This however is a playthrough that almost didn’t happen. It seems that I found a bug in FRAPs, that no one really expected. It seems as though frap is configured to ignore Steam, and instead of correctly searching for steam.exe in memory, they are just ignoring any process with steam in the title. As a result… SteamWorld Dig seems to be incompatible with fraps. Luckily I remembered that you can also take screenshots through the steam overlay with f12. While this is not exactly what I like to do… as I tend to disable screenshot functionality and have fraps do all the work… that way all of my screenshots end up in the same directory… I made do.

I picked up Steamworld Dig some time ago during one of those insane steam sales. Basically if it is a game that I have been wanting and it drops at or below $5 then it is pretty much an instant buy for me. I know sooner or later I will get around to playing it, and especially now with this new Sunday feature. The premises is deceptively simple… Metroid-Vania with Mining. In the game you play a robot miner who is coming to Tumbltown to follow in the footsteps of his uncle. The uncle had the claim on the mine directly below the town, and as such your are exploring the mine looking for resources and upgrades.

The game employs an inventory system that looked deceptively like Minecraft, but in reality at least to the point at which I have played, you can only remove blocks, you cannot ever replace them other than with ladders that can be purchased for 5 coins each. The result is that initially you can only store quantities of three different ores at the same time. This quickly becomes an issue as before getting very deep you are regularly getting half a dozen different ores. This involves a lot of running back and forth to the surface to sell your wares in the little town. Each time you sell you are working towards an upgrade threshold cap. Each time you earn a certain amount of money you unlock additional new upgrades.

The upgrades are then purchased with the coins you are earning from selling ore. Initially you have access to the trading post and Cranky’s upgrade store, but I am assuming much like Bastion that over time other places may open for business. The first upgrade you can get is to your pick axe which similar to upgrades in Minecraft allows you to mine existing ore types faster, and the ability to break new ore blocks that you previously could not. Similarly in the second tier of upgrades you can add an additional bag slot allowing you to carry up to four types of ore at a time. This of course means fewer trips back up to the surface, and more time down below mining.

As you explore, you will uncover caves that shoot off of the main dig. These usually hide power ups and unlock new functionality. For example the waygate above gave me the ability to equip run boots, which means while pressing down X on my 360 controller I can run, and in the style of Super Mario World, jumping while running increases the range and height of the jumps. Additionally there are blocks that disintegrate as you walk over them, so in many of these puzzle caves the only way to get through is to run quickly over top of them. All of this progression will seem extremely familiar to anyone who has played a Metroid of Castlevania game. unlock tools so you can get to new places and unlock more tools.

The game play gets progressively more and more difficult which adds an interesting spin on the Metroidvania genre. Since you cannot replace rock, you are essentially making your own playfield at all times by the choices you make as to what to dig and where to dig it. This means you can make life hell as you remove the wrong block at the wrong time. The game play is more about what you choose to leave standing and less about digging down to a specific objective. Above you can see my first death as I managed to get squashed by a rock that until this point I did not realize would fall down when I mined under it. This is also a decent time to highlight the lamp bar on the upper right corner of the screen.

As you dig down your lamp light decreases at a steady rate. There are various fossils that will wake up when you get close to them and spawn worms. Killing these will drop an item that does two things. Firstly it will refill one bar of your health, and secondly it will add oil to your lamp meter letting you stay down longer. The only problem is it becomes pretty easy to dig deeper than you can possibly return from on a single lamp charge. There really seems to be no penalty for going without lamp other than the fact that you cannot see what you are doing. This means that you cannot identify what type of block you are mining your way into… which is suicide since there are the boulders that can crush you placed throughout the levels at an ever increasing pace.

The Wrap-Up

The game play is extremely fun and I found myself spending an hour or so playing the game before reaching a point at which I thought I could realistically write up this blog post. The only thing lacking with the game seems to be a point. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, but both Metroid and Castlevania and the modern equivalent Guacamelee all have a narrative that drives the pace of the story ahead. SteamWorld Dig on the other hand has a series of small objectives, but I am not sure if I am really building towards anything meaningful. I am digging so that I can get stuff that will let me dig faster. I don’t really care about the cast of robots that inhabit Tumbletown… yet. Over time this might change, but at an hour into the game I really am not feeling like there is some great purpose behind what I am doing.

That is to say, the game is completely enjoyable without this deeper meaning. The game play is fun, the controls are responsible and it has as good of a wall jump implementation as I have seen. The problem is it just feels like there should be something more. I mean I realize you wander into the town and find your dead uncle, but this doesn’t seem to cause much intrigue or story to happen. Hell at this point I would even take a pokemon-esc “I want to be the very best” dialogue sequence to explain why I care about mining. I realize these are robots, but even robots should have a reason why they are doing things.

Would I purchase the game again after having played it? Honestly yeah I would suggest folks picking it up, but only doing so at a deep discount. The game play is fun enough and it seems like a glorious time waster. It is the type of game you can just zone out and enjoy the mechanics of. The animations are cute and the sound design is really nice in places. I just keep hoping that eventually I will uncover something even vaguely resembling a plot.

Comfort Gaming

January 11, 2014 by Belghast

Tamiflu Chasers

Over the last several days I have talked about my own respiratory misery. My focus over this time had been on somehow surviving through to Friday and not making a complete and total ass of myself during my presentation. It seems that I was at least somewhat successful in that mission, however during all of this time I seem to have neglected the fact that my wife had been getting progressively worse. It reached a head last night when at bedtime she was running a 101* temperature. This morning she teetered back and forth on whether or not we should go to urgent care.

For those not familiar with the absolutely fucked up medical system here in the United States… Urgent Care is this weird beast that sits somewhere between your doctors office and the actual emergency room. The idea is to create a construct that allows you to get after hours emergency style treatment for non-life-threatening ailments. In the master plan the insurance providers tend to treat these like doctors office visits, and as such you only have to pay one neat co-pay. The problem is… they are insanely deluged with patients. Our local Urgent Care place opens at 9 am on Saturday, and we were there mere moments after opening… and the waiting room was already completely filled.

I dropped my wife off at her suggestion, and ran around running errands in the meantime. We are both a bit concerned that I will catch something since firstly… I was born with a naturally weakened immune system, and secondly… that my lungs are already in a pretty severely compromised state. I felt like an ass for her waiting alone, but she and I texted back and forth throughout the morning. At roughly 10:30 I picked her up and she was brandishing a prescription for tamiflu. She was in fact diagnosed with the real life full blown Flu, and unfortunately despite my yearly flu shot this puts me in a pretty bad place for likely catching it from her.

As a result I am in the process this morning of trying to get ahold of my own primary care physician to attempt to procure a preventative prescription for tamiflu as well. Needless to say my morning did not go anywhere near planned and as a result I am finally sitting down to write a blog post. With all the excitement I don’t really have a whole lot to say. Or at least nothing more exciting than what has already transpired.

Comfort Gaming

One of the best things I have discovered in the past year is the Alternative Chat podcast. If you are not in fact already an avid listener you should make steps to rectify that. In the latest episode the Godmother of Faff mentions a term that is so uniquely perfect, that I am shocked I had never heard it used before now. “Comfort Gaming” is a concept that is very near and dear to my heart, but I never really had an adequate term for it. There are so many gaming experiences that I can return to time and time again when I am in the need of some solace. Here in Oklahoma we are big on “comfort food” with our heaping piles of mashed potatoes and white gravy and our chicken fried steak. This same concept applied to gaming also makes sense.

I guess in a way WoW is my comfort gaming. I spent so much time trying to move past the game, but in fighting it I was denying the fact that I really did enjoy it and the people who play it. Sure there are so many games out there that do one thing or another so much better than the World of Warcraft. Games like Rift are pinnacles of technical brilliance with their deep systems within systems. However something just gets lost in the translation at times, and in all of my years of wandering between games I have found another game that fullfilled so many of the little high points I have looked for in a single package. Playing wow, questing, farming, exploring, collecting transmoggy bits, soloing old world content… all feels comfy.

Crawling back into the game this time was like breaking out that worn out pair of jeans that just feels amazing. There is nothing new under the sun in wow, and it is not exactly a pinnacle of innovation… but what you have here is a really great mix of fun ways to spend your time. I created my WoW Bucket list as a way to have something to fall back on when I got bored. Thing is with the great number of people I have assembled in my guild… I have yet to really get bored enough to search on the list for some purpose. Purpose seems to find me constantly in either helping someone else out or getting a wild whim that I want to follow.

So as I embrace the year of faff, I am also embracing “comfort gaming”. WoW is by no means the only comfort game I have. I find myself able to crawl back into the Fallout or Elder Scrolls worlds and get lost for an entire afternoon at a time. Similarly I am deeply looking forward to the release of Elder Scrolls Online… because that universe is one I supremely love. However saying that, I have no real intent to abandon the World of Warcraft. It scratches an itch for me, and in part is that way because of the amazing people that are playing it. While I could never play a game only for the people… the mixture of absolute fun activities and amazing folks makes the game as sticky as ever for me.